Helen Cole
Contribution on Bristol Day: Live Art Oral History, 30 April 2007

In the forthcoming Arnolfini publication on the work of Manuel Vason, Rebecca Schneider’s text states:

You may have to excuse me. Pardon me. I don’t mean to jostle, to push in here, to chime, but I seem to want to say: I am here too. Remember. I am collaborating. I was there and will be there in the future of the event that is even now still taking place: the document as performance as document. Now. Still. Live, Still… taking place. In someone’s hands. I was there in the future. Me – spectator: event attendee.

Live is a call, weary of linear time, calling: Cross
Love,
Collaborator

When I arrived at Arnolfini in 1998, I entered a place full of ghosts, full of stories of events that happened before I was there….

Alastair Maclennan’s performance with pig’s lungs, that filled the building with the smell of decay.
The fire alarm three quarters of the way through one of Goat Island’s highly physical first UK performances, evicting both artists and audience onto the docks. When allowed to return to the space, the company merely waited for the audience to settle, took a breath and began the show from the beginning once again.
Moti Roti’s performers dancing with Bristol’s antiquated dockside cranes, suspended in mid-air in big skirts for hours.
Mayhew and Edmunds covering the theatre space with turf.
Blast Theory’s terrifying Pit Pull herding the audience into tightly packed corners in their show Stampede, when only an animal and surveillance cameras were enough.
Graham Miller’s Girl’s Skipping
Adventures in Motion Pictures’ first residency
Shobana Jeyasingh’s first post-show talk.

The stories of these events were told to me by people who were there, people who have latterly also become the audience for performances in my own programme. Beyond these anecdotes however, I have not found evidence these events ever took place. Proof might lie in a piece of print in a dim corner of Arnolfini, but I haven’t found it yet. To be honest I don’t really think I mind about this, because for those who were there, these shows still resonate within the walls of Arnolfini. As Rebecca Schneider says, they are still alive. And as soon as the stories were recounted to me, I too became their witness, adding my own embellishments and probably subtracting important aspects in the process. And in my retelling today, you too have become witnesses. What will you add in the future? I don’t mind if we together haven’t got the facts quite straight. Their slippery legacy is what we have built live art upon.

Compared to the boxes and boxes of catalogues, photographs and objects that represent the rest of the programme, Arnolfini Live has very few. Until recently our tapes and pieces of dusty print were kept in a couple of old cardboard boxes under my desk, where my footprints have joined those of the previous three programmers, as we have leant our feet on them over the years. So, why this seeming disregard, some would say, abuse, of these materials?

I emanate from a generation that was the first to have regular access to technology. As a result, the documentation of the live event has become almost compulsory. Over the last 10 years I have been at Arnolfini, I have faithfully added into our dusty collection, recognising that in so doing I was securing the potential to make a decision about its significance at some point in the future.

As usual in live art practice, we steal the parts of others’ methodologies that interest us and discard those we don’t. The photographic images of Carolee Schneeman, the shakey video of Chris Burden, the ladder of blades that lacerated the feet of Gina Pane. All these traces give evidence that the live work once happened. Yet they cannot begin to conjure the performance, what it felt like to be one of the limited few who were there or even the one that did it. We know these objects are something else entirely. Marina Abramovic talks of her dissatisfaction at the ability of the camera to capture a live work before an audience, her destruction of that resulting document, and subsequent re-making of the performance for the camera, resulting in the iconic works we watch as ‘live’ still.

I recognise that the traces in the boxes under my desk, are not the whole story. I look at them with a healthy mistrust. They provide a glimmer of the experience of really being there, yet I feel uncomfortable about their solidity, their fixedness. They cannot capture the alchemy of collaboration between artist and audience, the electrical charge of presence. Every now and then I open these old boxes to stare at the names and the works that once happened, but they feel like they are past and finished, done and dusted, lying out of reach somewhere.

The role of the curator is caught somewhere between conservator, caretaker, collector and cataloguer of things! Yet, in the world of performance, the curator’s materials are not objects, but experiences, so how do we begin to collect, catalogue, conserve or care for memories? I realise that, as in Rebecca Schneider’s text my approach as a curator has to be as alive as the live work I engage with.

My programme combines real experience with expectation – a risky combination. I am unrelenting in my search for the type of performances that I long for. And as the years pass I am gradually building up a picture of what shape that performance could take. What taste, smell, touch. Is it dark or light, am I there with others or alone? Most of my own seminal performance experiences, have probably been documented by somebody, somewhere, but in quite a few cases, the performances have only been experienced by two people: me and the artist. No one else knows what happened in my version of Franko B’s Action 333, although others have experienced the same work. However, I know in my retelling I can make you feel for a moment that you were there too.

A man sits staring with dark black eyes, under a clock that counts our number away. My number is called and I am told to remove my shoes. A door opens and a man beckons me into the next space. I enter to find a room painted white, completely, there is no dark or shadow in this space, apart from the one that I cast. In the corner with his face to the wall stands Franko, his body bulky and naked, painted pure white too. He wears a surgical collar, the kind that dogs wear to stop them worrying at their wounds. The door slams closed and it is just him and me. I feel cluttered and self-conscious with my clothes and my detritus. Franko turns, glances and walks towards me, I stay still staring but feeling utterly exposed. He stands before me, his comical collar upright, his hands reaching out. I take his hands and look into his eyes. Hello, how are you? I say. How polite and mundane I sound, yet I really mean it. I want to break this distance and difference, but sense there is something. He strokes my fingers and massages my palms all the time looking into my eyes. I am OK, how are you? I don’t answer. Let’s walk he says. We move towards an opposite door, our hands still clasped together, a slight swing in our step. I glance at our fingers and only then notice the deep, red wound in his side, only a few inches away. A wave of shock hits me, then the door opens, Franko smiles, lets go of my hand and the door closes behind me. I am out in a dark corridor alone, my shoes are waiting and as I stumble with the laces, I notice my hands are covered in white grease paint. Proof of our meeting, that we touched and moved on.

I believe that curators function like artists, they build a programme like the artists build their work, through the piecing together of ideas and experiences. From the moment I got to Arnolfini, I began to add into a mythological landscape, to contribute to a history in the making, to add mine and others’ stories to the pot. The indefinable chemistry between artists and audiences is my material, helping to create a body of work over time.

As a curator I am aware that I am partly responsible for making up a picture, putting the pieces together, juxtaposing them, naming them, collecting the stories of being there and finding new ways to keep the experience alive for those who will follow. This is urgent, we have the evidence in the myths and dreams and tricky, slippery thinking. Now how the hell do we document that?